Similar switching assemblies of the aforementioned species allow the separation, for measurement purposes, of a plug connection between incoming and outgoing glass fiber cable cores. These incoming and outgoing glass fiber cable cores have to be easily accessible and have to be cross-connectable, i.e. connected in any desired manner. The switching assemblies serve, in particular, for the local fiber-glass network (overlay network) of the respective telephone companies.
A similar switching assembly of the aforementioned species is known in the art from "telcom report", vol. 10, March 1987, pages 27 to 32. Such a switching assembly is a glass fiber cable terminal rack has 60 plug connections provided in a central patch field. The glass fiber cable plug connectors are pre-assembled, in the factory, as so-called pigtails (plug connector with glass fiber cable core), which have to welded at the installation site to the glass fiber cable cores. For this purpose, in the lower section of the terminal rack, a magazine provided with slide-in openings for splice cassette is disposed. The magazine is adapted to be flapped out from the frame supported at the rack in a direction towards front, so to remove the splice cassettes. Further, as a switching assembly, a glass fiber cable partitioning rack is known in the art, which comprises three opposed splice fields, i.e. magazines provided with slide-in openings for splice cassettes. In the upper magazine of which are the cores of the interoffice cables, in the central magazine of which are the cores of the internal cables of the exchange office and in the lower magazine of which the cores of the subscribers' cables are supported.
The connections between the various glass fiber cable cores are established by switching wires. In both embodiments, 10 splice cassettes of each splice field are combined to a magazine which is located on a flap-out arm, from which the magazine can be taken out and wired at the work table.
The switching assemblies for glass fiber cables of the telecommunication and data technology described above have the disadvantage that there is relatively poor accessibility to the incoming and outgoing glass fiber cable cores, the risk of breakage, in particular when splicing, being high.